Saving Lives with Fossil Fuels

What is the biggest global environment problem? Many believe it is global warming, after all, the issue gets the lion’s share of headlines and accounts for much of the hell-in-a-hand-basket environmental news we come across. But, as I previously wrote on this blog, 2.9 billion people living in energy poverty people face a more immediate problem: indoor air pollution. They are desperately poor, and many cook and heat their homes using open fires or leaky stoves that burn dirty fuels like wood, dung, crop waste and coal.

About 4.3 million of them die prematurely each year as a result of breathing the polluted air inside their homes, which is between 50 and 250 times (depending on different estimates) more than the deaths attributed to global warming.

Still, air pollution doesn’t garner the headlines afforded to global warming because it’s not nearly as interesting. In the West, we take our supply of reliable electricity for granted. We have already forgotten that electrification has ended the scourge of indoor air pollution in the rich world, saving millions of lives. Rather, we’re very concerned with climate change.

Now our politicians have second thoughts about further electrification of Africa and Asia because of rising CO2 emissions. Instead of helping the 2.9 billion people gain access to cheap and plentiful electricity, thus combating both poverty and the biggest environmental killer, indoor air pollution, we insist that developing countries focus on renewable energy. For example, the U.S. has decided to no longer support the building of coal-fired power plants in developing countries.

But this is hypocritical: in the Western world we get only 0.8 per cent of our energy from solar and wind, and we also use a lot more energy than developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, excluding South Africa, the entire electricity-generating capacity available is only 28 gigawatts — equivalent to Arizona’s — for 860 million people. About 6.5 million people live in Arizona.

In just three decades, China has lifted 680 million people out of poverty. It did so not with solar panels or wind turbines, but through a dramatic rise in access to modern energy, mostly powered by coal.

Today's global warming policies like solar and wind, on the other hand, remain largely inefficient and expensive. They cost $60 billion in subsidies but provide less than 1 percent of global energy. At best, they’ll provide just 3.5 percent in a generation’s time.

An analysis from the Center for Global Development quantifies our disregard of the world’s poor. Investing in renewables, we can pull one person out of poverty for about $500. But, using gas electrification, we could pull more than four people out of poverty for the same amount. By focusing on our climate concerns, we deliberately choose to leave more than three out of four people in darkness and poverty.

But even as we push to get serious about confronting climate change, we should not try to solve the problem on the backs of the poor. For one thing, poor countries represent a small part of the carbon-emissions problem. And they desperately need cheap sources of energy now to fuel the economic growth that lifts families out of poverty. They can’t afford today’s expensive clean energy solutions, and we can’t expect them wait for the technology to get cheaper.

This message is obviously not popular with everyone, and Bill Gates has been attacked for his very sensible stance, as Alex Epstein points out in his recent Forbes op-ed. Yet, Gates clearly says that we still need to fix global warming in the long run. The point is, this requires the rich Western countries to step up investments into research and development in green energy technologies to ensure that cleaner energy eventually becomes so cheap that everyone will want it. But until then, unrealistic green goals should not stand in the way of poorer nations having a chance of getting out of poverty with fossil fuels.

I want us to get a sense of proportion to our worries. That sometime means challenging your biggest concerns, while pointing out that things you may never have heard about are much more important. I also try to get us to focus on the most cost-effective solutions. We can on...